Spring cleaning and new year's intentions

Because you can make fresh starts any time of the year

Image via my good friend Kari at a grace full life

The summer was hard.

It was hard for reasons I’ve both shared and kept private, and honestly the particulars don’t matter. What matters is that it was a season marked by pain, discomfort, anticipatory grief, and worry. And so many days of 90+ temperatures. I capped it off with two weeks in Louisiana, adding ungodly humidity to the mix.

When I returned to Oregon, it was to cool temperatures and blessed, blessed rain. And I felt something dormant in me coming alive again. I felt like myself for the first time in months.

Sweet, sweet cool rain

Cane and I spent our first full day back home deep-cleaning our living room and re-arranging furniture. I meal-planned for the first time since June, went to the grocery store, and bought new plants for the window box outside the kitchen window. (They died while we were away.) I went to the gym and got my heart-rate up, and then did every single one of my PT/OT exercises. We ate every meal at home.

For the first time in months, these things brought satisfying joy.

Last week Cane returned to school, and I was reminded that for me, September will likely always be the start of a new year, one of my favorite seasons. I love new beginnings, the return to milder weather, and the lack of formal holidays. It is the time of year I feel most energized and hopeful. For me, it’s a much better time than January for new routines and intentions. I need them this year more than ever, as we’re forging a new normal. It’s the first time since I retired from full-time education work three years ago that we haven’t had one of my children living with us.

As I’ve been pondering what I want to bring in and let go of, two recent reads have been so useful.

Diana Strinati Bauer, in “The beauty that is aging,” suggests that the important question to ask ourselves isn’t how we can somehow hang onto youth (because we can’t) but is instead, “Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” She writes about wanting to be her “best me,” and doesn’t that sound like a great thing for all of us to be?

“Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” doesn’t feel morbid or gloomy to me, but clarifying. The more death becomes a concrete reality than a fuzzy, some-day abstraction, the more purposeful I get about living. Diana reminded me, again, of Annie Dillard’s famous words:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”¹

But how do we become the person we want to be on our last day? How do we determine how to spend our days, and how do we get to our best versions of ourselves? I know that at the end of almost every day, things I hoped to do have not been done. How do we keep from frittering our hours, our days, our lives, giving service to that which doesn’t best serve us?

I found a possible answer to these questions in Mary Hutto Fruchter’s “The Essential Ingredients.” Mary makes a case for focusing on essential ingredients for all kinds of things—a garden, a school’s goals, a family, a life purpose, a book manuscript. She says, “This idea of simple ingredients works for me. Long lists are overwhelming, and often when I make them, I forget them.”

Amen.

We cannot attend well to 10 “priorities.”

This year we expanded our gardening skills in one way, by growing a few vegetables from seeds. Beets and carrots were a success.

It’s been helpful, as I’ve been making the transition from Louisiana to Oregon, from summer to back-to-school, from a daily life with my young adult daughter to one with a more-empty-than-not nest, to think about the essential ingredients for a life I want to cultivate in the coming season.

For me, the list looks like this:

Health: I am still recovering from my brain injury last November. (I know. It’s taking a long time! I’m still too close to the whole thing to say much about it, but there are some things to say. Later.) When I do my full, recommended PT/OT activities, it takes about 2 hours a day. This includes both cardio work and specific visual and vestibular exercises. I can’t do all of it every day, but I can do most (or just some) of it every day. That’s my hope.

Food: Closely related to health, but not exactly. We had a summer with lots of eating out. I want to return to planning meals, shopping well, and eating real food at home most days. I want more veggies and less meat. I also want to bake. (This week I made an apple and a fruit crumble.²) I want us to eat well, in all senses of what that means.

Home: I’ve been caring for only surface-level essentials since November, and our home is feeling it. Deep-cleaning our living room and changing a few small things up rejuvenated something in me. I want to do this for each room in our house, and I’m finally feeling able to. Who says spring cleaning has to happen in the spring?

Relationships: I had so many wants/needs with immediate family this summer, I made a conscious decision to put friendships on the back-burner. I want to bring them forward. I want to prioritize friendships that are deep, the ones in which I and the other person are able to be our truest selves. I also want to better attend to my relationship with my parents.

Creative play: I have signed up for (and committed some real money to) Jeannine Ouellette’s Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL. (Registration closes September 12, so if you’d like to join, the time is now.) I participated in two of Jeannine’s writing intensives during the spring and summer; her teaching and community have opened things up in good and unexpected ways. It’s not shown up much here, because what’s happening is (for now, anyway) a behind the scenes thing. (And that’s OK. This is not the season to focus on growing my Substack.) I also want to make things with my hands, and I bought Yumiko Huguchi’s A Year of Embroidery to give me a concrete structure for playing with embroidery. Her book features projects for each month, and my hope is to complete one a month.

That’s it: 4 big areas, no more than 2 concrete actions in each.

(Side note: I am super-aware that the coming months are big ones for the US. So much is hanging in the balance for us and the larger world we have so much impact on. I am not in a season of life to be able to do much on that front, which is why I so much appreciated Asha Dornfest’s recent post on “high-impact, low-stress, and high-joy” ways to support Democratic campaigns across the country.)

As I’ve been writing this post and pondering fresh starts and new year’s intentions (a word I choose over “resolutions”), I’ve been thinking that it makes much more sense to think of doing this for every season, rather than once a year. I can see already that my list will need to change as fall gives way to the winter and its holidays.

As it always seems to be now, small is better for me. A compact list, a short amount of time, priorities for a little, healthy, happy life.

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I would love to catch up with you in the comments! How was your summer? What are you looking forward to as we shift to a new season? What are you going to focus on in the coming months?

I so look forward to hearing from you and learning from you.

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1. For more on this, I appreciate Maria Popova’s take on Dillard’s “meditation on the life well-lived.” https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/06/07/annie-dillard-the-writing-life-1/

2. I used recipes from Grand Central Bakery; here’s one that uses summer berries: https://www.grandcentralbakery.com/blog/summer-fruit-crumble